PERSPECTIVES
With Fragments, the gallery is pleased to present Fabien Yvon's first solo exhibition.
The artist brings together, for the very first time, a group of paintings, drawings, and etchings, a technique he practiced and taught at the end of his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts.
Empreintes series depicts the traces of the artist’s and his partner’s bodies in a performative gesture; they flatten themselves on human-sized canvases and apply Chinese ink around them. Their imprints thereby act on the canvas like a photographic developer.
Another aspect of Fabien Yvon's work, made of engravings and paintings, leads us to question what is “the infinitely large and the infinitely small”. Where the scientist sees a set of very fine particles, held in suspension in the atmosphere, the artist looks at light, colors, shapes, and movement. These paintings, like Petri boxes, are the result of pictorial experiments that highlight the properties of the materials used.
Finally, a selection of latest works from his most-known project, Paysages intérieurs, is exhibited. In this series, Fabien focuses on developing the idea of “the mental image"; the artist doesn’t use any existing images, as he tries to explore the different layers of an imagination both personal and collective.
Fabien Yvon comments, “The images I draw are not the same as those I paint or print. This constant back and forth with different mediums is essential to me. This leads me to question myself, about the relationship I have with each of them, and what I do about it.”
Olivier Waltman
Paris, April 2023
ARTIST STATEMENT
About landscapes
Fabien Yvon's paintings, engravings and drawings are above all mental images. It is in the moment of manufacture that memories of lived experiences, landscapes observed while driving, and memories of works mingle. Richter, Turner, Boudin, or even Victor Hugo, encountered on the walls of museums or between the pages of books, nourish memories of landscapes seen. Photos taken while driving, never used directly, have the same function of capturing and accumulating strata.
The landscapes are born from the meeting of these mental images and the traces left by certain technical gestures. Brush, rag, wiper, plastic ruler, window cleaner, or any other object nearby allows you to draw paint on the canvas, whip, blot, erase, scrape. The random leaves margins, surprises, the medium allows the resumes. For engravings and drawings, the gestures are more precise, anticipated and drawn with a certain mastery. The tool requires more precision while always leaving a margin of indecision. The knowledge of a medium nourishes the relation with another.
Total absence of architecture, or of human trace, it is the word landscape however, which structures these compositions. Often two horizontal parts, more or less distinct, without certainty of scale, where the sky can become sea. , even recognized. The usual vocabulary, mountains, clouds, mineral or aquatic effect, comes to meet the materials, hatchings, points, effects of superpositions, and assembles them in the unit of an evocation of almost precise landscape.
About the printed gesture
“What interests me in the dark is not so much the reason for its use as the surprise of its result. Play with the gap between the staging of the work and what remains of it in terms of traces, imprints, impressions. Sometimes at the limit of legibility between action and production, the process and its theatricality make it possible to leave the space of the painting and put it back into play. The video leads to re-determine the links between the image, the action and performance space. Also determining, the attachment device accentuates and reveals this reflection of displacement.
Naming and titling are also work and play with the spectators, either by further disturbing their reception or by revealing the production processes. It is a way of entering with humor in this intimate space located between the spectator and the work. It is also a kind of minimal dialogue in which I try to redefine my action. The ambiguity, the shift are then assumed as part of the game.
Video is not so much a means of recording the performance of the manufacturing as another moment of turmoil. Sometimes much stronger than the object produced and seeming disproportionate in relation to this result, it makes it possible to keep visible the staging, the assumed and almost ceremonial gestures of pictorial actions recorded on media. For example, the unchecked arrow starts from the eye, continues aiming and then releases in its trajectory what makes painting. "
Fabien Yvon